Hungry Ghost
Violent Soho’s third album finds the Brisbane band making an acutely detailed study of their hometown, writes JAKE CLELAND.
You know that old song ?Home Among the Gumtrees?? John Williamson, bloody legend. ?A clothesline out the back, veranda out the front and an ooooold rocking chaaaaair??
Right, well, Hungry Ghost is essentially an update on that. Except the gumtrees Violent Soho vocalist Luke Boerdam howls for are actually the four-bedroom, two-bathroom boxes which fit together to build the ?90s ideal of suburbia, the ticky-tacky townhouses around which real life is said to have once occurred.
It seems fictitious now, looking back from within the epochal hellscape in which we now find ourselves. Time was, a young man could work hard, start a family, and know they’d have a roof over their heads for life. While wrinkly rockers like Nick Cave are gazing upon modernity with confusion and query, the kids, already weary of it, are longing for the time before Facebook and Snapchat made human interaction about as engaging as turning on a light switch. Going forward is not always progress, you know. Hey, when does this come out on vinyl?
?The imagery’s filled in with rusted clotheslines, night-time drives, sunny afternoons and fossils in the sand.?
Violent Soho’s third album has the Brisbane four-piece preoccupied with the outside. The physical, geographical outside. You could hope for it to metaphorically mean socially or politically, but Hungry Ghost?s relationship with society’s norms is more complicated than out-and-out rejection. ?Covered in Chrome? opens with what might be resignation about a life spent driving around and picking through old memories before bleating ?All I ever wanted was a piece to myself/All I ever wanted was a 9-to-5.? In the second verse it turns into ?All I ever wanted was an afternoon/A middle class and an open sky,? while the punk and metal kids rant about wrongs and hail Satan amidst a chorus of ?HELL FUCK YEAH!?s. The imagery’s filled in with rusted clotheslines, night-time drives, sunny afternoons and fossils in the sand. Like sand through the hourglass, these were the days of their lives.
On ?Liars? he sings, ?It’s okay to watch the TV/It’s okay, I understand? and, yeah, sometimes you just wanna chuck on Today Tonight after a long day and have someone else gather your thoughts for you. After all, the only thing you need to worry about with a war in Syria is how it’ll affect the price of unleaded at the local servo, and maybe know enough of the talking points to seem informed next time you’re at the pub. Then again, maybe you get off on the death and carnage. ?You’re obsessed with war,? he sings on ?Lowbrow?, but ?Your skin ain’t torn.?
?Let the faithful have their faith; it’s a terrifying, indifferent universe.?
This is obviously not the life Boerdam thought to pursue in the recesses of his young mind, the deeply buried parts where he knew he wasn’t really gonna die gloriously young. ?All I say is all I know and all I know is what you made me,? he whines on ?Dope Calypso?, spitting resentment at the way conservative society moulds its citizens.
On ?In the Aisle?, Boerdam has a go at the people surrounding him all wrapped up in religion (the ?aisle? presumably refers to church pews), asking why everything they say sounds hollow. Faith tends to come off that way to nonbelievers but you’ve gotta admire their conviction. The logic might sound hollow but it’s a whole lot less scary than staring into the abyss of meaninglessness in a world without a Creator. That hatred seems kind of reflexive, like ?I’ve got nothing to hold onto and neither would you if you’d only stop lying to yourself!? Let the faithful have their faith; it’s a terrifying, indifferent universe.
Musically, well, the new Pixies EP is shit so here’s this. Boerdam’s Billy Corgan-via-Tom DeLonge vocals ain’t the only star here. Luke Henery’s bass, Michael Richards? drums – these form the bulk of Hungry Ghost?s hardness, the capital R-O-C-K stitched across the band’s blistered knuckles, but it’s James Tidswell’s shape-shifting guitaring what makes the record so listenable. For ?In the Aisle? it is a brash, crunchy rhythm. On ?Fur Eyes? it’s a warm buzz. On ?Gold Coast? it’s a snappy pop-punk riff. Every time something varied and new, tying together the record and giving Boerdam a colourful pulpit from which to preach.
As a study of small-town character, Hungry Ghost* is acutely detailed, but sometimes comes off pretty scathing. It’s ironic given how conservatively it’s delivered. Grunge might’ve been a countercultural dalliance in the early ?90s but it’s a relic now, as familiar and comforting as eating ice cream at the playground on a warm, after-school afternoon. Largely, *Hungry Ghost is content to examine and their subjects hardly come off more wretched than the band themselves. It takes one to know one, after all, and you know Violent Soho couldn’t understand these people if they weren’t, in some small way, still those people themselves.
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